Airplanes, cats, guns, war, the more than occasional rant about the kleptocracy of President Spanky and his party of treason, the spinelessness of the Democraps and ramblings about anything else that flits through the somewhat offbeat mind of an armed lesbian pinko as she slides down the Razor Blade of Life.Caveat lector.

Words of Advice:

"Never Feel Sorry For Anyone Who Owns an Airplane."-- Tina Marie

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

"Flying the Airplane is More Important than Radioing Your Plight to a Person on the GroundWho is Incapable of Understanding or Doing Anything About It." -- Unknown

"There seems to be almost no problem that Congress cannot, by diligent efforts and careful legislative drafting, make ten times worse." -- Me

Heard on the news tonight (Floria primary underway): "We'll bring you updates throughout the evening."

No, thanks. I'll either go watch some basic cable station that won't bother with updates or I'll just switch off the idjit box altogether. This is just one bullshit primary of many and I can wait until tomorrow to find out who the purported winner happens to be. As Dave Barry put it:

BadTux asks: Why the hell not? Why not return to the Moon and then go to Mars? It can't be any more wasteful than the F-35 or the V-22 programs. We build bridges to nowhere so that people will have jobs building the bridges. In the overall scheme of things, going back to the Moon and to Mars is expensive, but not overly so.

But is it possible? I am not terribly sure that it is. A hell of a lot goes into flying a large spacecraft. For example, during the Apollo program, the first all-up test flight of the Saturn V-Apollo stack was in November of 1967. The first manned flight was the Apollo 8 translunar flight in December, 1968. The Air Force began the development of the Saturn V main engine in the mid-1950s. The Air Force was going to drop the engine, realizing that they just didn't have a need for an engine of that power, but NASA took it over. The first all-up test firing of the F-1 engine was in 1959.

We cannot build them that big anymore. The RS-25 engine of the Space Shuttle is the largest flying engine that we can make in series production and it is less than a quarter of the power of the F-1. The RS-68, designed in the 1990s, is maybe half the output of a F-1, it is used on Delta-IV rockets and it has only flown a few times. In comparison, the workhorse of the American rocket program is the Atlas V which has a main engine, the RD-180, that is built by NPO Energomash in Russia (for the Atlas-Centaur, the Centaur upper state uses an American RL-10, which was originally developed in the 1950s).

NASA has resurrected the J-2 engine that was used on the second stage of the Saturn V. Some of the old engines were dragged out of of storage and museums and test-fired to support the development of the new J-2X.

Going to the Moon is, of course, more than just rocket engines. The Apollo capsule was under design in 1961; the first iteration, the Block 1, was so rushed that it killed three astronauts on the launch pad in 1967. Grumman was awarded the contract for the Lunar Excursion Module in 1962, though Grumman had been studying the concept on its own dime since the late 1950s. When President Kennedy proposed going to the moon by the end of 1969, most of the pieces were already in the planing pipeline and some of them had been tested.

Even if we get there, everything that is needed at the Moon base, for now, would have to be fired out of the Earth's deep gravity well to the Moon. A Falcon-9 costs $50 million or so to launch and it might be able to send 400 pounds of stuff to the Moon. A Delta IV heavy can get ten tons to escape velocity at $400 million and given that you'd need some sort of engine and such to slow the stuff down and land it, maybe you be able to land three or four tons of usable freight on the Moon. 8,000 lbs, that's something like $50,000 a pound in freight costs to the Moon. How much stuff would it take to build a habitable shelter on the Moon, given that there is no radiation protection and without radiation sheltering, a nice large solar flare, like the kind that we are seeing now, might cook everyone there?

So it will be expensive to construct, to maintain, to live there. Should we?

Here is one reason: If civilization survives for another five or ten centuries, the 20th Century will be known for three things: The invention of powered flight, the Moon landings and the development of atomic weapons. All of the rest will be the province of historians, in the way that the 15th Century is remembered for the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.

If the 21st Century is going to be remembered for anything, it will be either for a Moon colony or a Mars landing. It would be nice if our national government could get its shit together so that the first language spoken on Mars is English.

Gingrich is a past master at hamstringing and backshooting. He's been trying that against Romney, but Romney and his allies have the resources to take it to Gingrich, hammer and tong, and you can hear Gingrich whining about it on almost every news broadcast.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

It is the time of the year when the National Rifle Association distributes ballots for choosing its new slate of directors. Almost everyone is deeply involved in gun issues, whether as a 2nd Amendment advocate or a manufacturer or a shooting instructor, or a hunter, or something like that.

Except one guy, whose connection to firearms issues seems rather tangential: Some clown named Mr. Grover G. Norquist of Washington, D.C. Other than being an unelected one-man no-tax goon squad, there is little indication that ol' Grover has ever held a firearm in his fat, pasty mitts.

Wassamatta, NRA, you couldn't talk either the Blubbering Fascist or Snowflake Snookie into being on the board?

One has to wonder what sort of platinum-plated nonsense the Air Force was doing in order to drive the cost of a drone over that of a manned aircraft doing the same mission.

Or, it could be that this is a serious bit of Air Force fuckery that did exactly what they wanted to: Keep seats in manned airplanes. For while the Air Force has been adamant about only using rated pilots to operate drones, even those clowns know that nobody is going to join the Air Force in order to basically play with a fancy flight simulator program.

Note that one of the people that Barbour pardoned for a felony DUI conviction is being prosecuted for another DUI in which he killed a teenager, something that had to have been known to Barbour when he let the clown skate from his earlier crime.

Too bad. There are eighteen books in the Stephanie Plum series and it could have been a lucrative movie franchise. I know a fair number of people who are fans of the series and all of them were more or less appalled at the idea of casting Heigl in the role.

I was thinking of seeing it, but even an early showing is six bucks in these parts. I'll wait until the DVD hits the buck-a-night Redbox.

Make no mistake about it, the FAA's excuse for wanting to shut down the VOR network, which is "the stations are beyond their economic service life", translates into "we haven't bothered to maintain it for the last fifteen years". The FAA's proposal to scrap the VOR network is beyond stupid, it is criminally short-sighted.

If you think that the FAA is displaying classic bureaucratic moronosity, then go here and post a comment against the proposed rule. Not a lot of people have done so, so you guys need to step up to the plate.

The MD-220 was one of the first business jets to be certified in the transport category. McDonnell designed it as a proposal for the Air Force, which wanted a small jet for navigation training and executive transportation. Lockheed won the contract with the JetStar.

The MD-220 never went into production. The reasons vary, depending on which source you read. The two theories seem to be that either McDonnell had too much work from the military to devote factory floor space to the MD-220 or an inability to land enough contracts to justify series production.

The prototype airplane still survives, long-term readers of Trade-a-Plane will remember seeing it offered for sale from time to time.

Daniels, who is currently on track to drag Indiana down to the level of Mississippi, hasn't been known in the past for being exceptionally accurate when it comes to economics. As Bush's budget director, he said that the Bush tax cuts would lead to budget surpluses, when they really led to staggering deficits. Daniels took his job when the Federal government was running budget surpluses of over $200 billion; he was a major player in running it in the other direction. He stated that the Iraq War would cost, at most, $60 billion and he fired the analyst who said that it would cost $300 billion. (The overall cost of the Iraq is on the order of $3 trillion.)

They know it's true. To glom from BadTux, the race right now is between Sleazy dwarf and Creepy dwarf.[1] Frothy and Goldy are pretty much only serving a vote-sinks who are hurting Sleazy, as nobody who votes for them would have voted for Creepy.

I miss the entertainment value of both Crazy and Dopey. I wasn't sad to see Oily go, as he was probably the one who was most likely to win n November. But he wasn't nutty enough for the modern GOP.
__________________________[1] I know that BadTux refers to Sleazy as "Grumpy". Here, Newt's Sleazy dwarf.

That's four hundred thousand dollars a week. No wonder he thought that his speaking fees weren't "much money". In comparison, if you made thirty grand a year and you had a side job where you took in an extra six hundred dollars: That would be comparable to the scale of Romney's little side work.

I would have thought it would have been another 5-4 or maybe 6-3 case, with the usual cliques arguing that the government is free to monitor whoever they want and so on.

Here is another wrinkle: The cops were monitoring that dude for four weeks, which the Supremes said was far too long without a warrant. They declined to address what shorter period of time would be OK.

So the court stuck to narrow grounds. Unlike in Citizens United, where the nuts in black took a narrow question and used it to subvert the entire political system.

There is a fine line between teething problems and garbage. When they try to push the state of the art, it's pretty easy to slide into piece of shit. Sometimes what is tried is too much of a leap and, when the technology matures a little, it could have worked. For every P-51, they often build a XP-55. Or, if you like the Garand and the Pedersen.

The difference is often whether a program's problems are addressed directly or papered-over in the hopes of being able to fix the issues after the gizmo is in service. My suspicion is that papering-over is what is going on, as the fear may be if the Navy openly addresses the problems with the LCS program, it will go the way of the Zumwalt class DDGs. It still might.

And then we can get to the issue of why somebody who arguably sits on his ass and lets the money roll in pays a lower tax rate than someone who holds down a full-time job.

You've probably seen the link all over the place, but if you haven't read the Rolling Stone article on George Romney, you should. It's hard to escape the conclusion that while Mittens may be a hundred times richer than his dad ever was, Mittens is also a hundredth of the man.

Contrast that to his son, who is willing to say anything and do anything to win an election. Nobody really can be certain what Mitt believes in, because he can flip and flop within seconds on anything. But we do know one thing for certain: A third of a million bucks is chump change to Mittens.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Nobody seemed to wait longer than a nanosecond after the polls closed before calling the SC primary for Newtie.

Other than taking the wind of the sails of Mittens the Inevitable, I don't know if this means anything. It may toughen Mittens up a little, as for a guy who supposedly is big on preparation, Newt sandbagged him every step of the way. This race is going to get nastier and if the fight is going to go to the dirtiest, I suspect it'll be Gingrich's to lose.

Only somebody who has been drinking the Wingnut Kool-Aide for a few decades would believe that killing an American president would do anything good for the nation responsible. If anything it would create enmity that would take at least two generations to abate.

Israel receives over three billion dollars a year in foreign aid. Anyone who thinks that those monies would continue to flow if an Israeli prime minister were to have our president assassinated would have to be certifiably insane.

The writer of that column is either insane or a seditious bastard. Or both.

Our government is big on freedom in the abstract. By "our government", I am referring to both parties, for each one has areas where they want to kill off freedom in order to satisfy some pea-brained constituency. One thing is for sure, there are very few corporations that promote freedom. Most will gladly sell the tools of recession, whether it is internet-blocking software, data-mining to identify dissenters or electronic torture devices, to whomever will pay for them.

In case it is not obvious to you, today is not a Tuesday. It is a Saturday. South Carolina is holding its primary vote (they are not caucusing, they are voting) on a Saturday.

This makes so much sense that having an election on a weekend should be adopted immediately. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 and Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 of the Constitution permits the Congress to set the dates of all Federal elections.

Congress should do this forthwith. But they won't, for there is one political party that mouths the words of democracy, but in practice, their existence depends on denying as many citizens the right to vote as they possibly can.

Jake is normally a pretty easy-going cat. When Gracie horns in on wherever he is lying, he usually gives way. But not on the heated cat beds when it is winter. Gracie got on the bed with him and he was not giving way.

Gracie gave up and left him alone.

But Gracie and George seem to have no problem with sharing one of the beds. Part of that is that Jake is a much larger cat. The other part is that George and Gracie grew up together. Even though when they were younger, they weren't as willing to share.

Chris Dodd and the MPAA were clearly surprised of the blowback to their proposal to establish their version of the Great Firewall of China. Their lobbyists and bribes campaign contributions did not avail them. At least at this time.

So they will back off, for now, and hope to sneak the bill through. Possibly buried in some omnibus funding bill.

I went to the range the other day with my newbie friend. We were shooting at one of these, a reduced-sized silhouette at about 20':

I asked her if she wanted to try the two .45s that I brought. She didn't care for the 1911 Government Model. Then she shot my .45 Colt (Clone) SAA with Magtech "cowboy" loads. They're a little slower than full-power stuff, but they aren't exactly mouse-fart rounds, either. She hit the center of the target five times out of five shots.

When finances are better, maybe we'll look into getting her some good training. I think she has the makings of being an excellent shooter.

This morning I was looking at one of the cat beds, realizing that I needed to wash it sooner or later. Then Gracie was lying on the bed when I gave her her morning meds. She then puked up the meds and her breakfast, right onto that cat bed.

So now it's in the wash.

(And 30 minutes later, I gave her the meds again and she kept them down.)

And did he not think that this was all not going to come out and that people would look askance at it?

Or is this just more of the attitude of a man who thinks that $375,000 is "not a lot of money"? A man who can casually afford to wager ten grand on a bullshit bet? But hell, ten grand is pocket-lint level cash for the Mittster.

Well, I am going to miss the fun of having The Most Uninformed Politician Since Palin out there on the campaign trail. Perry is another one of the "the Lord told me to run" crowd; either Perry had a defective receiver or this is a good indication that the Almighty has a sense of humor.

Dubya was, at least in `00, a likeable boob who had people in the shadows doing his dirty work. What his goons did to McCain was beyond reprehensible. Of the things I sort of admired about McCain, one was that he was eventually able to work with Chimpy. If I were in that position, I would have held a grudge a mile wide and a thousand feet deep.

Perry came across as being dumber than Bush and about as half as personable.

Romney lacks personality to the point of being robotic. Unlike his dad, Romney comes across as the kind of guy who would eagerly shiv your grandmother if he could make a nickel out of the deal.

I know it's old news, but effective a month ago, the NYPD outlawed the Kahr K9 as a permitted off-duty gun. It was banned for new purchases and those who had them were grandfathered, but that ended. The issue was the trigger pull; supposedly the brass at 1PP have decreed a minimum trigger pull of 12lbs.

Word I heard is that Glock is running a hell of a trade-in deal for the NYPD officers, $50 for a Glock 26. Or they can buy a S&W 3916(?) for six bills or better.

How is this fucking fair? Just because rich douchenozzles like Mittens get the Congress to write the tax laws so that pirates and sponges pay less a percentage of their income in taxes than people who actually work for a fucking living?

Oh, and according to what I heard on the TV, ol' Willard was saying that he earned "a little bit" in speaking fees for his last tax year. "A little bit" to Mittens was somewhere around a quarter of a million dollars. You can be in the top 1% in most areas of this country with just making what that insulated jackoff regards as "a little bit".

A quarter of a million bucks is nothing but chump change to Willard M. Romney

This chart shows the distances from the main gear to the tailhook on a number of naval aircraft.

As noted in some of the articles on this, the problem is that they can't relocate or lengthen the tailhook on the F-35C. Unlike other airplanes, where the hook retracts up against the fuselage (and is visible in-flight), the F-35C's hook is retracted and stowed internally, so the hook is within the stealth skin. So they just can't move it aft and let it ride out in the breeze, as that would tend to compromise the stealthiness of the airplane.

The Navy has been successfully designing carrier-capable aircraft for the last ninety or so years. There are specs on how the geometry of a tailhook should be set up. Apparently, the upper-level project managers just disregarded them and figured that they could ignore proven engineering art and that as long as the hook could touch the deck, the pilots would make it work.

Stalin would have had the program managers shot by now. We, on the other hand, are just throwing billions of dollars at this project and will throw tens of billions more in order to make it work. Even if we have to retire a carrier to do it.

You can find naysayers all over the place when it comes to Dr. King. I've seen at least one blogger who was celebrating that today is "Jackson and Lee Day", because they were "honorable military officers," regardless of the cause they served[1], because neither owned slaves.[2]

Dr. King's influence will live on long after the time that the names of the bigots who tried to perpetuate segregation are forgotten. His name and what he stood for will be known long after the names of Civil War generals are as well known as the generals of the Polish-Ottoman War.[3]

Dr. King's work, unfortunately, is not yet finished.[4] it sure won't be over because some pundits on a certain propaganda network declare "racism is over", while completely ignoring the toxic effects racism has had and continues to have in this country. It isn't over by a long shot.

But we continue to make progress. And that is worth noting.

____________________________________________[1] So were Erwin Rommel and Friedrich Paulus, for that matter. "Jackson and Lee Day" is a holiday created by racists, using the cover of two generals to draw a sheet over modern-day hatred.
[2] Neither Rommel nor Paulus personally shoved people into gas chambers.
[3] Quick, who was involved in the Battle of Nasiriyeh?
[4] That is why you have been reading and hearing all manner of disguised racist comments, both subtle and not-so subtle, for the past few months.

A real patriot will serve in the Federal government if called upon by the President, even if the sitting President is from the other party,

Gay people's relationships should be legitimized by the state,

The Earth is several billion years old, and

The Earth revolves around the Sun.

Huntsman's problem was that of the statements in that list, only one of those is believed by the religious whackaloons and nostalgic Confederates who have captured effective control of the GOP's nominating process. He's a conservative; Huntsman appeared as to a moderate only in comparison to Frothy, Flip-Flop Mitt, the Megalomaniac and the Cranky Old Bigot. I have felt all along that as a candidate, Huntsman posed the best chance of defeating President Obama. But hey, if they want to go with the Mormon Robot, that's their call.

In other political news, if you care about Santorum's chances, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a lengthy article about his use of earmarks when he was in the Senate. In short, Frothy used earmarks mainly to benefit those who paid bribes made campaign contributions, not to benefit the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Too many people in this country regard "rights" as "privileges", not as being inalienable, but as being bestowed conditionally by the sovereign. All it takes is one sharp blow for the bed-wetters to scream "we'll give up our rights, just protect meeee". It is a sad commentary on the state of this nation when the only nationally recognized politician who is talking about this is some old conspiracy whackaloon with a background of Jew-baiting and racism.

One party has no spine. The other party's definition of "freedom" is only applicable to white Christian heterosexual males.**

We are so screwed.
______________________________*GD's Motto: 'Fascism May Not Be Fun, But It's Profitable!"
** And fetuses.

A fair number of evangelicals regard Catholics as being even worse heathens than they regard Jews. Old-line evangelicals held that Catholics were heathens. For Catholics in the South, it was not unusual for them to come outside after Mass to find that their cars had been leafleted by the Baptists.

It was not unusual for the Catholic and Jewish kid to band together, for they had a common enemy. Among a lot of New York Jews, who were only a couple of generations removed from the immigrants from Slavic Europe, hooking up with Catholics was heavily frowned upon. But things were different in the South.

It is a sign of desperation when those same evangelical church leaders are turning to a Catholic to save them from Flip-Flop Mitt.

The article goes on to say, however, that the link between processed meat and pancreatic cancer was only shown for me. for women, the results were "inconclusive".

But there was no way in Hell that I could resist the snark of the title for this post.

You might be able to counter the risk by increasing your daily intake of nickel and selenium. Doesn't sound too appealing, though. I'll bet that in a month, you will be able to find that dietary supplement at GNC.

If those clowns in the Bush Administration are so convinced that they did the right thing, then one one think that they would jump on a chance to defend their alleged honor. But they won't. Canada might even be too hot for Chimpy and his cabal of torturers. It's probably too much to hope for that if he was traveling by air, that his flight would be intercepted.

The ordering of the use of torture by the Bush Administration has been a deep stain on the honor of this nation. The dishonor continues because, as a nation, we have so far refused to clean up our own shit.

We should.

But we won't. Our beloved country will turn out to be worse than Germany and no better than Japan when it comes to investigating and prosecuting its war crimes, a path that was established by Rumsfeld and Cheney when they covered up an investigation of earlier war crimes.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Thirty years ago today during a blizzard, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac River on takeoff from Washington National Airport. It clipped the 14th Street Bridge on the way down, killing four people in their cars.

That bridge is now named for Arland D. Williams, Jr. He was a passenger on the flight; he declined rescue in order to help other people to safety which cost him his life. Another man, Lenny Skutnik, took off his coat and boots and jumped into the river to save one of the passengers. Both gentlemen were awarded the Coast Guard's Gold Lifesaving Medal.

Designing and flying a space probe calls for a lot of skills. Skills are perishable. In our everyday lives, we all know this. The more times that you do something, the better you get at it. Whether it is cooking, skiing, shooting, the more practiced you are at something, the better you can do it. As you get better at something, you learn the tricks and techniques that aren't in the books.

Designing and flying space probes is no different. There is a lot that can go wrong; the Hubble would have been a failure if it wasn't in an orbit reachable by the Shuttle. A few minutes' worth of research will show you the testing that is being conducted for the Webb Space Telescope. If you have ever seen this animation of the steps involved in deploying the Webb Telescope, it is pretty complex.

Designing and flying these things takes a lot of skill and experience. Knowing how to do it and knowing what can go wrong, as well as what can be done to minimize the chances of failure, is not for amateurs.

The same is true, unfortunately, for other technically deep programs. That's true for designing airplanes, ships and submarines. If you don't keep at least a core group of engineers employed, the skills will be lost. One of the problems that the Russians have been having is that the collapse of the Russian economy in the 1990s resulted in the elimination of a lot of their technical capabilities, which is one of the reasons why the Russians turned to buying warships from the French.

Some technologies basically hit maturation and then it doesn't matter as much. But some have not and for those, it's either keep working at it or give up the ability to do so.

It would be so easy to get them to do so. All it would take is for President Obama to talk a few times about how we are all carbon-based forms of life. The Republicans, especially Rick Santorum, would trip over themselves to deny that we are carbon-based life forms. Except for Mitt Romney, who would flip-flop several times on the issue.

Speaking of Flip-Flop Mitt, the Daily Show had tape of him taking only 12 seconds to flip-flop, just go to 4:18 in this clip. That has to be a land speed record for the flip-flop.

Santorum found a way to beat his Google problem: He paid for an ad to be the first result. He's also got the same problem on Bing, but since nobody uses that search engine very much, it doesn't seem to get the same press. But ol' Frothy is currently trying to step away from his little bit of racism.

It should be little surprise that, when it comes to treating misbehaving school kids as members of the FFA,*Texas leads the way. So if Johnny shoots a spitball at Timmy, little Johnny might be hauled off in handcuffs.

Get this: Yelling on the playground can get the kid a ticket. And if the parents don't pay it, as soon as the kid turns 18, the po-po will arrest the kid and lock his or her ass up.

How does this make any sense to anyone, at least anyone with a working cortex?**
________________________________* Future Felons of America.
** Which, of course, excludes school administrators.

Smoking turbojets on airliners, with good food, pleasant stewardesses and people dressing up to go to the airport. 707s, 727s, DC-8s, 880s and if you look in the background, you can see the older piston-engined airliners still in use. Eastern, Western, Braniff, TWA, Pan Am, Northeast, and other airlines that have long ago gone bankrupt or were merged out of existence. You'll see carbon-copy tickets, which were written by hand and no TSA!

I was perusing a lot of the blog posts that were in response to Weer'd's idea. There were more in a bunch of gun blogs that didn't post a linked comment in Weer'd's blog.

I think it is safe to say that I posted the worst photo. using one candle as illumination was probably the reason, especially since all I had was a "prosumer" pocket camera.

By the way, have you seen the specs on the new Nikon D4? Standard max film speed is ISO 12,800 and it can be pushed by some sort of expansion pack to 204,800. I can't comprehend how little light would be needed to take a photo at that film speed.

George was barfing up a storm last night. I don't know what his problem was, but he was retching at five-minute intervals, starting at 2310. I'd switch on the light, see where he was puking, clean it up, go back to bed and just have turned the light out when he was at it again. He did that five times before he got out whatever was bothering him (which I couldn't see in the last puddle of barf). Hearing that "Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack! Splat!" is kind of like hearing the GQ klaxon go off, it'll awake most cat owners from a sound sleep.

This almost would set a new record for being short-sighted. To my mind, this passes the idiocy of scrapping the NDBs. Between NDBs and VORs, pilots have enjoyed redundant methods of radio-based navigation. LORAN and GPS added to that redundancy.

But the redundancy is going away. NDBs are being dismantled as fast as the FAA's little feet can move. The Coast Guard has been scrapping the LORAN stations. Now the FAA wants to dismantle the vast majority of the VOR network, leaving just a skeleton network that would be only useful to the airlines.*

The article cited above mentioned that LightSquared's proposed network could severely degrade the usefulness of GPS. I've blogged about that a fewtimes. GPS signals are very weak signals and they can be jammed or interfered with. Under the FAA's proposal, most of you guys flying IFR would be shit out of luck if something happened to the GPS signal.

It is odd, to me, that I've heard people carp about single-engined airplanes as having no redundancy, but now those same big-iron pilots are going to happily launch into the clouds with no redundancy when it comes to the second most important part of flying.** Some of those big boys have three comm radios and two transponders so even if they lose one of each, they can continue on, but they'll trust their asses to just one method of navigation?

The FAA needs to pull its collective head out of its ass and keep the VOR network up and running. If they need to replace/upgrade VOR stations, they should do that.

(H/T)
__________________* Who the FAA regards as their "customer". As far as the folks at 800 Independence Ave are concerned the rest of us FLIBS ("fucking little itinerant bastards") are the enemy.
** Avigate, navigate, communicate.

Samuel Colt had it right: Guns are equalizers. I am physically no match for a strapping twenty-something intruder, especially if he is armed with a large knife or a bludgeon. But with a gun, I have a chance. A gun is not a majick talisman, but it does provide a chance to survive an attack by a bad guy who is close to a third of my age and half-again my size.

And that is all I ask.

____________________[1] Yes, I know I'm a big fan of the .45 cartridge. But even in a smallish gun, they are not as concealable as either of these two.
[2] I've lived in places where that would be exceedingly fast, even if they came Code 3.

Rule No. 5: Terms of Service: Political appointees of the Obama and Bush Administrations may not read this blog unless they (i) post a comment confessing same and (ii) acknowledge that both men are war criminals. This blog may not be read by members of the Arizona Legislature.

Violation of this term is a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and you're off to share a cell with Chris Christie, asswipe.

Rule No. 6: If I wanted you to write a "guest post", I'd ask you. Don't bother asking me to put one up from you. I won't. Start yer own goddamn blog.You Have Been Warned.